New Health Care Links

There is still a ton of interesting writing about health care reform coming out daily and I am sure most of you are aware of the discussions taking place in Congressional districts across the country. I thought it would be good to provide some new links that we have been looking at this week.

First, I can direct you to our new web page charting the differences in the congressional health care proposals. This chart was put together by Chuck Konigsberg, Concord's Chief Budget Counsel, who writes our weekly Washington Budget Report. Subscribe to the budget report to get updates when Congress is in session about where the health care reform debate is heading and other budget news.

Concord also has a new page devoted to health care where you can get our newest and most relevant publications to the current debate.

We've been having an interesting internal debate over whether and how the reconciliation budget process might be used to pass health reform legislation. Doing so would get around the need to find 60 votes in the Senate to break a fillabuster.

The tricky thing with reconciliation is that there are procedural rules that limit the types of legislative changes that can be enacted. Friend of Concord and budget expert, Stan Collender's take is here. Ezra Klein's is here.

Interestingly, the Wall Street Journal has a report that Democrats in the Senate might both use reconciliation and not use it!

Finally, I wanted to direct you to the Washington Post's cheat sheet on health care reform--a good attempt to describe the current reform parameters in less than 1,000 words.